Perspective Quotes

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

~ Niall Ferguson

No mountain is of any appreciable height to break the curve of the sphere.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Sometimes you just have to stop and take in your surroundings. Really look at where you are in life, otherwise it's just going to pass you by. Regret is a heavy word to live with. - Riley

~ Justine Winter

We were sleeping on the same bed with our backs to each other trying to imagine a new life.

~ Kalyani Rao

I had a dream about you last night... and in it you said Chin up; it only gets harder.

~ Marshall Ramsay

And I understand now, maybe not completely, but more, that in times of overwhelming joy, immobile sadness, hysterical laughter, absolute fear, and sometimes just perfect quiet there is Life. Real Life. And it really is that simple. I take my gift now. I go live.

~ Dito Montiel

Imagine a wall that's green on one side and red on the other. You stand on one side and only see green. I stand on the other side and only see red. We'll both be right about the color we see, even though we disagree on what color the wall is. Being able to realize that the other person has a valid point, even if you disagree with it, that's maturity.

~ Oliver Gaspirtz

...and that there were many things grow-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

~ Nick Joaquín

When Gregory says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did they do it?’ But when he says, ‘Are they guilty?’ he means, ‘Did the court find them so?’ The lawyer’s world is entire unto itself, the human pared away.

~ Hilary Mantel

My step-dad’s rendition of events was uncontested even by me and therefore, it became our truth. Truth I’d never be able to prove or change; truth that protected him from suspicion and penalty. Truth that I now knew was a lie.

~ J.m. Northup

The key is to put your outrage in a place where you can get it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you're asked to explain new ideas or explain what you observed two people who share none of your experiences.

~ Ron Suskind

Our side has agents. Their side has spies.

~ Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

Espionage is the world's second oldest profession.

~ Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

On the Rules of PerspectiveA bad trick. Mistake. Dishonesty. These are the views of Braque. Why? Braque rejected perspective. Why? Someone who spends his life drawing profiles will end up believing that man has one eye, Braque felt. Braque wanted to take full possession of objects. He said as much in published interviews. Watching the small shiny planes of the landscape recede out of his grasp filled Braque with loss so he smashed them. Nature morte, said Braque.

~ Anne Carson

Life is something like a doctor's prescription: taken alone, and the ingredients might kill you; but properly blended, they bring healing.

~ Warren W. Wiersbe

...and that there were many things grown-ups did which couldn't properly be judged by young people until the young people were grown-ups themselves...

~ Nick Joaquín

With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.

~ Richard Rohr

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

~ Edmund Burke

…wondering, not for the first time, if there was a kind of dark bliss built into dementia: an immunity from death and abandonment, a way of fixing a point in time so that nothing can change, nothing can be rewritten, no one can leave.

~ Jonathan Miles

I will never listen to ocean waves or view a beautiful sunset in quite the same way again. That is perhaps the greatest gift one can gain by delving into calculus: It is a whole new way of looking at the world, accessible only through the realm of mathematics.

~ Jennifer Ouellette

Mujizat gampang terlihat dari sudut pandang takhayul.Miracles are easily seen from superstitious perspective.

~ Toba Beta

Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive.

~ J.j. Scarisbrick

The only people who really think they have seen something new are those whose experience is limited or whose vision can't penetrate beneath the surface of things. Because something is recent, they think it is new; they mistake now the for originality.

~ Warren W. Wiersbe

No wonder the sky had to be blotted out by advertisements. The stars drowned with lights. If everyone could see beyond Coalition horizons, perhaps they'd see the titans of humanity for what they were: tiny creatures, smaller than insects, and in the scale of things, every bit as insignificant.

~ S.j. Kincaid

Sometimes I lose perspective, but it helps to stop and look around. I may not have it all, but I have more than enough. And enough, it seems, is more than most have...

~ J.m. Darhower

Perhaps I am an insensitive rich woman. That doesn't change the fact that you can be downright mean and offensive, Kaladin Stormblessed.

~ Brandon Sanderson

There are those among us who have erred, deeply and significantly. Who have wounded the world and broken themselves. The worst of them lose themselves in their errors. The best of them crawl back, one foot at a time, and seek to amend their breaches. That is the way of the brave.

~ Chloe Neill

The whole underneath of Paris was an ant nest, Metro tunnels, sewer shafts, catacombs, mines, cemeteries. She'd been down in the city of bones where skulls and femurs rose in yellowing walls. Right down there, win the square before them. through a dinky little entrance, were the Roman ruins like honeycomb. The trains went under the river. There were tunnels people had forgotten about. It was a wonder Paris stood up at all. The bit you saw was only half of it. Her skin burned, thinking of it. The Hunchback knew. Up here in the tower of Notre Dame he saw how it was. Now and then, with the bells rattling his bones, he saw it like God saw it -- inside, outside, above and under -- just for a moment. The rest of the time he went back to hurting and waiting like Scully out there crying in the wind.

~ Tim Winton

Nothing is clear now. Something must be the matter with my way of viewing things. I have no middle view. Either I fix on a detail and see it as thought it were magnified -- a leaf with all its veins perceived, the fine hairs on a man's hands -- or else the world recedes and becomes blurred, artificial, indefinite, an abstract painting of a world. The darkening sky is hugely blue, gashed with rose, blood, flame from the volcano or wound or flower of the lowering sun. The wavering green, the sea of grass, piercingly bright. Black tree trunks, contorted, arching over the river.

~ Margaret Laurence

After 25 the only thing you’ll be precocious at is death.

~ Patricia L. Steffy

In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent.

~ Megan Smolenyak

The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us.

~ Megan Smolenyak

Education itself is Marketing--marketing tools and perspectives to people who don't necessarily realize why they need them, how it will serve them, what they might accomplish with them. And, ensuingly, Marketing itself is Education (with no attempt to assess the value of what is being marketed).

~ Shellen Lubin

What used to be edgy (divorces) has become mainstream and what used to be mainstream (racism and sexism) has become shocking.

~ Sara Sheridan

Trying to analyze a situation without enough data was like looking at a photograph of a ball in flight and trying to gauge its direction. Is it going up, down, sideways? Is it about to collide with a baseball bat? Is it moving at all, or is something on the blind side holding it in place? A single frame didn't mean a thing. Patterns were based on data. With enough datapoints, you could predict just about anything.

~ Marcus Sakey

In wartime, she thought to herself, you don’t call a death murder.

~ Sara Sheridan

Your violin has only two strings,” I say. “You’re missing the other two.” Yes, he says. He’s well aware. “All I want to do is play music, and the crisis I’m having is right here. This one’s gone,” he says of the missing top string, “that one’s gone, and this little guy’s almost out of commission.” His goal in life, Nathaniel tells me, is to figure out how to replace the strings. But he got used to playing imperfect instruments while taking music classes in Cleveland’s public schools, and there’s a lot you can do, he assures me, with just two strings

~ Steve López

The blazing sun beat down on the concrete of the museum's front yard- Reverend Ryu Yosop felt as if the heat were sucking up all the moisture in his brain and heart. What different colors he and his brother Yohan must have used as each of them painted their own picture of home, of the carnage. These people have constructed yet a different vision of their own, Yosop thought to himself, but it all stems from the same nightmare, the one we created together.

~ Hwang Sok-Yong

From the landscape: a sense of scale. From the dead: a sense of scale.

~ Richard Siken

The definition of stupid is the inabilitly to see another side to an argument other than one's own.

~ James Rozoff